Reviewed by:

• The Wife of Willesden by Zadie Smith
• Carla Neuss

Zadie Smith’s The Wife of Willesden, which premiered in November 2021 at London’s Kiln Theatre, transposes Chaucer’s (in)famous Wife of Bath from The Canterbury Tales to the present-day, multicultural suburb of London named in the title. For those needing a refresher on fourteenth-century literature, Chaucer’s magnum opus is comprised of twenty-four stories told by medieval English travelers to pass the time while on a pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral. The stories range from biography to sermons, farce to fantasy, but the Wife of Bath’s tale has had particular staying power due to her proto-feminist narrative of sexual fulfillment and female autonomy.

In Smith’s reimagining of Chaucer’s original, the Canterbury road is relocated to a pub in contemporary Willesden that is holding an open-mic storytelling night. Using this conceit, Smith reincarnates Alyson, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, as Alvita, a British Jamaican woman in her fifties who, like Alyson, has been married five times and is more than happy to recount the story of her misadventures in love and matrimony. In addition to her titillating autobiography, Alvita, like Alyson, offers her audience a tale that promises to divulge what women really want. Smith’s theatrical adaptation is loyal to the narrative structure of Chaucer’s text; the play devotes sixty minutes of its one-hundred-minute run time to Alvita’s account of her life and lovers. The final thirty minutes feature the story of a rapacious knight who must ascertain the true desire of women or else forfeit his life, but transposed to a mythic colonial Jamaica instead of the idylls of medieval England.

Smith maintains some key aspects of Chaucer’s original: her dialogue features a rhyme scheme that echoes Chaucer’s poetic meter; her Alvita, played virtuosically by Clare Perkins, is as arresting and entertaining as Chaucer’s Alyson; and her use of [End Page 99] contemporary slang cannily captures the cheek and wit of Chaucer’s pantheon of personalities. In other ways, though, The Wife of Willesden faltered in attempting to transpose its literary source material to the dialogic medium of the stage. Smith’s Alvita was backed up by an ensemble of nine other players who enacted her story as she narrativized it; however, the production at times seemed to reduce the ensemble to dioramic puppets, whose actions merely served as visual aids against which Alvita’s monologue played. In this way, it struck me that the Wife of Bath’s tale would perhaps be in better company not with ensemble-based performance but with the solo-performer show; the raconteurship that characterizes Chaucer’s original has more in common, both stylistically and substantively, with Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s stage version of Fleabag than Arabian Nights. Additionally, as theatre critics observed in the press, Alyson/Alvita’s sexual liberation is less revolutionary to a contemporary audience than it was in the Middle Ages. I was particularly disappointed that Alvita, unlike her medieval precedent, seemingly has no career other than serially marrying; Chaucer’s fourteenth-century heroine was an accomplished clothmaker and businesswoman. In this way, it is perhaps Alyson, not Alvita, who is truly the more progressive figu e, despite Smith’s best efforts

Clare Perkins (Alvita) and three of her five husbands: Marcus Adolphy (Winston), George Eggay (Eldridge), and Andrew Frame (Ian) in The Wife of Willesden. (Photo: Stephanie Berger.)

For historians and scholars of literature, Smith’s adaptation resonates with recent efforts to decolonize and diversify the field of medieval studies. While the Wife of Willesden strove to demonstrate the uncanny contemporaneity of many of Chaucer’s themes, the deployment of race was underdeveloped. Alvita’s language is peppered with British Jamaican slang and euphemisms, to the extent that the entire program provided by BAM was devoted to a glossary of the “North Wheezian” dialect of its protagonist. However, this use of language seemed to perform a racialized subculture without necessarily directly engaging in...

 审阅者：

• 
  扎迪·史密斯的《威尔斯登的妻子》
•  卡拉·诺伊斯

扎迪·史密斯 (Zadie Smith) 的《威尔斯登之妻》于 2021 年 11 月在伦敦 Kiln 剧院首演，将乔叟著名的《坎特伯雷故事集》中著名的巴斯之妻移至片名中提到的当今伦敦的多元文化郊区。对于那些需要重温十四世纪文学的人来说，乔叟的巨著由二十四个中世纪英国旅行者在坎特伯雷大教堂朝圣时讲述的故事组成。故事范围从传记到布道，从闹剧到奇幻，但巴斯之妻的故事因其对性满足和女性自主的原始女权主义叙事而具有特别的持久力。

在史密斯对乔叟原著的重新想象中，坎特伯雷路被搬迁到当代威尔斯登的一家酒吧，该酒吧正在举办开放式麦克风讲故事之夜。利用这一构思，史密斯将乔叟的巴斯妻子艾丽森转世为阿尔维塔，一位五十多岁的英国牙买加妇女，和艾丽森一样，她结过五次婚，并且非常乐意讲述她在爱情和婚姻中的不幸经历。除了她令人兴奋的自传外，阿尔维塔和艾莉森一样，还为她的观众提供了一个承诺揭示女性真正想要什么的故事。史密斯的戏剧改编忠于乔叟文本的叙事结构；该剧一百分钟的演出时间中有六十分钟讲述了阿尔维塔对她的生活和情人的描述。最后三十分钟讲述了一位贪婪的骑士的故事，他必须确定女性的真正欲望，否则就会失去生命，但却被转移到了神话般的殖民地牙买加，而不是中世纪英格兰的田园风光。

史密斯保留了乔叟原作的一些关键方面：她的对话采用了与乔叟诗意韵律相呼应的韵律；她饰演的阿尔维塔（Alvita）由克莱尔·帕金斯（Clare Perkins）精湛演绎，与乔叟饰演的艾丽森（Alyson）一样引人入胜、引人入胜；她对[完第99页]当代俚语的使用巧妙地捕捉到了乔叟笔下的人物万神殿的厚颜无耻和智慧。然而，在其他方面，《威尔斯登的妻子》在试图将其文学素材转移到舞台对话媒介方面却步履维艰。史密斯饰演的阿尔维塔得到了其他九名演员的支持，他们在她叙述的过程中演绎了她的故事；然而，制作有时似乎将整体简化为立体木偶，其动作仅充当阿尔维塔独白的视觉辅助工具。通过这种方式，我突然想到，《巴斯之妻》的故事或许更适合独奏表演，而不是合奏表演。乔叟原作的叙述风格与菲比·沃勒-布里奇的舞台版《伦敦生活》比《天方夜谭》在风格和实质上有更多共同点。此外，正如戏剧评论家在媒体上观察到的那样，艾莉森/阿尔维塔的性解放对于当代观众来说并不像中世纪那样具有革命性。让我特别失望的是，阿尔维塔与她中世纪的先例不同，她似乎除了连续结婚之外没有其他职业；乔叟笔下的十四世纪女主人公是一位出色的布料制造商和女商人。这样一来，尽管史密斯尽了最大的努力，也许艾莉森才是真正更进步的人物，而不是阿尔维塔。

《威尔斯登的妻子》中的克莱尔·帕金斯（阿尔维塔饰）和她的五个丈夫中的三个：马库斯·阿道夫（温斯顿饰）、乔治·埃盖（埃尔德里奇饰）和安德鲁·弗雷姆（伊恩饰）。 （照片：斯蒂芬妮·伯杰。）

对于历史学家和文学学者来说，史密斯的改编与最近中世纪研究领域的非殖民化和多样化的努力产生了共鸣。虽然《威尔斯登的妻子》努力展示乔叟的许多主题具有不可思议的当代性，但种族的运用还不够成熟。 Alvita 的语言中充满了英国牙买加俚语和委婉语，以至于 BAM 提供的整个节目都专门介绍其主角的“北威兹语”方言词汇表。然而，这种语言的使用似乎表现出一种种族化的亚文化，而不必直接参与……